Dennis Freire, Associate Director- Financial Disclosure, Pfizer won the Customer Award for a stand-out contribution to one of the biggest existential challenges facing pharma: the spiralling costs of clinical research.

One of the major bottlenecks is clinical trial recruitment, and with multiple trials competing for increasingly niche patient populations, this challenge will only increase.

Dennis Freire, in partnership with a team from ICON Firecrest, launched an innovative project to identify and resolve the key hurdles preventing patients from registering for trials in order to address this supply challenge of patients for trials.

Ethnographic and participatory research strategies pointed to onerous and confusing paper registration processes as a key driver of patient frustration. In order to address the tedium of existing processes Dennis Freire built a cross-disciplinary team of experts engineering, public policy and behavioral science to design more concise methods to communicate complicated information.

From this research the eConsent project was born, and Dennis Freire’s team launched animated videos to explain registering and digital registration options. Randomized control trials testing this intervention against current common practices, showed outstanding performance based on aesthetic appeal and retention of educational information. Unsurprisingly, given the mind-numbing complexity of the paper-based predecessor, it outperformed on both counts.

By shining a spotlight on this landmark advancement and the winners in other categories, eyeforpharma aims to evangelize these patient-centric values, and encourages other healthcare actors to celebrate ideas that put the patient before profits.

The winning projects were selected from hundreds of initiatives from across the USA, and announced yesterday at the 2nd annual eyeforpharma Philadelphia Awards ceremony.